03/10/2026
The Unique Survival Trait of the Thylacine: The Pouch?
One of the most intriguing things I’ve found while researching the thylacine is just how little we actually know about the behaviour of its young.
We have museum specimens, old photographs, a handful of captive observations and scattered historical accounts.
What we do not have is anything approaching a modern behavioural study of a thylacine family living naturally in the wild.
That matters when looking at the Yowza footage I filmed in the Yarra Ranges in October 2025.
The thermal sequence was recorded at roughly 125 metres, in pitch darkness, using handheld thermal binoculars. So yes, there is ambiguity. I’ve never pretended otherwise. But ambiguity does not mean the entire sequence is meaningless.
Some features are reasonably clear.
Yowza uses a sustained bounding gait rather than the diagonal trot you would normally expect from a canine moving at this speed. When the footage is enlarged, the rear limbs also appear at times to make full hock contact with the ground, effectively plantigrade behind while remaining digitigrade at the front.
Then there is the thermal signature beneath the rear of the animal, in the position where a female thylacine’s rear-facing pouch would be.
The animal itself has also been measured indirectly. Extensive measurements of trees, fence posts, fence lines, distances and other fixed objects visible in the footage were taken and externally analysed, both conventionally and with AI-assisted scaling. The resulting estimate is approximately 55 cm at the shoulder, 105 cm head-and-body length and around 18–22 kg.
That is useful because it removes as much of my own bias as possible. I am not simply looking at the footage and saying, “I reckon it is about this big.”
The more controversial features are the ones I am much more cautious about.
For a very brief period there appears to be a wee warm-bodied outline on the rump, and elsewhere there is what I have called the double-tail flash.
Both could be pareidolia. But pareidolia is the interpretation of real visual information it is not the same as hallucinating something that simply is not present.
This is where the historical evidence becomes fascinating.
There are accounts describing thylacine joeys scrambling towards the mother, entering the pouch and even climbing onto her back. That behaviour is not particularly extraordinary when compared with living marsupials. Tasmanian devil and tiger quoll young can climb onto and cling to their mothers.
The thylacine forepaw is also interesting. Pocock’s 1926 illustration shows five claw bearing digits, with the first digit positioned low and adjacent to the main pad rather than elevated like the dewclaw of a dog. Preserved thylacine pouch young also show extremely sharp juvenile claws.
That does not prove that thylacine joeys routinely rode on their mother’s back. But anatomically, a joey had the equipment to climb, grip and hold.
And this brings me back to Yowza.
Before she crossed the paddock, I had been filming young male kangaroos fighting. She appears to notice me and looks in my direction several times. Then she makes a dash across the open ground.
If the feature on her rump really is a joey, the most interesting part is how quickly everything seems to happen. Within perhaps one or two seconds, the young appear to rearrange themselves and the animal continues bounding efficiently away.
That would make sense as a survival strategy.
A female carrying several young in a rear-facing pouch could initially escape in whatever configuration was necessary, then rapidly reposition them once a safer distance had been gained. One joey temporarily climbing onto the rump could free space or allow the others to settle properly before it returned to the pouch.
We know kangaroos and wallabies may eject young when under extreme pursuit. What we may be seeing here, if the interpretation is correct, is something quite different: a mother preserving her young while simultaneously maintaining an efficient escape gait.
Could it simply be distortion? Of course.
Could the apparent joey be pareidolia? Absolutely.
But that is precisely why I think the footage deserves examination by people with better image-processing skills, zoological expertise and technology than I have.
The easy response is to call it a mangy fox, an injured dog, or another blurry “Bigfoot” image.
The more interesting question is whether any known animal actually explains the gait, measured proportions, estimated weight, apparent pouch and possible maternal behaviour together.
Watch just some of the footage in my full 4-minute breakdown at the link: https://youtu.be/JjrGK9TyxY8?si=zRUmayuylenC_hw-
and let me know if the footage is worth more than a video on the internet and a proper investigation.
